Rosencrantz:
Nor do I, really. It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean, one thinks of it like being alive in a box. One keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never *know* you were in a box, would you? It would be just like you were asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you. Not without any air. You'd wake up dead for a start, and then where would you be? In a box. That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That's why I don't think of it. Because you'd be helpless, wouldn't you? Stuffed in a box like that. I mean, you'd be in there forever, even taking into account the fact that you're dead. It isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off, "I'm going to stuff you in this box. Now, would you rather be alive or dead?" naturally, you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance, at least. You could lie there thinking, "Well, at least I'm not dead. In a minute somebody is going to bang on the lid, and tell me to come out."

Rosencrantz:
Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occured to you that you don't go on forever. Must have been shattering. Stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it. It never occured to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squawling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, theres only one direction. And time is its only measure.

The Player:
There's a design at work in all art... events must play themselves out to an aesthetic, moral and logical conclusion. We aim at the point where everyone who is marked for death... dies. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they can reasonably get.

Rosencrantz:
To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies. You are his heir. You come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother pops onto his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now... why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?

Guildenstern:
If it is, and the sun is over there for instance, that would be northerly. On the other hand, if it's not morning and the sun is over there, that would still be northerly. To put it another way, if we came from down there, and it's morning, the sun would be up there, but if it's actually over there and it's still morning, we must have come from back there, and if that's southerly, and the sun is really over there, then it's the afternoon. However, if none of these are the case...

Rosencrantz:
I merely suggest that the position of the sun, if it is out, would give you a rough idea of the time. Alternatively, a clock, if it is going, would give you a rough idea of the position of the sun. I forget which you are trying to establish.

Guildenstern:
It could have been - it didn't have to be obscene! I was prepared. But it's this, is it? No enigma, no dignity, nothing classical, poetic - only this, a comic pornographer and a rabble of prostitutes!

The Player:
You should have caught us in better times. We were purists then.

The Player:
We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

Rosencrantz:
It was question and answer, all right. Twenty-seven questions he got out in ten minutes, and answered three! I was waiting for you to *delve.* "When is he going to start delving?" I asked myself.

Ambassador from England:
The sight is dismal / And our affairs from England come too late. / The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, to tell him his commandment is fulfilled,/ That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

[Rosencrantz has been flipping coins, and all of them are coming down heads]

Guildenstern:
Consider: One, probability is a factor which operates *within* natural forces. Two, probability is *not* operating as a factor. Three, we are now held within un-, sub- or super-natural forces. Discuss.

Rosencrantz:
[Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have read the switched letter and learned that they will be executed]
They had it in for us, didn't they? Right from the beginning. Who'd have thought we were so important?

Guildenstern:
But why? Was it all for this? Who are we that so much should converge on our little deaths?

The Player:
As England is Denmark's faithful tributary. As love between them, like the palm might flourish, et cetera, that on the knowing of these contents, without delay of any kind, should those bearers, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, put to sudden death.

Rosencrantz:
"Oh, I've heard of *him*, alright, and I want nothing to do with him. You march in here without so much as a 'By your leave' and expect me to take in every lunatic you try to pass off with a lot of unsubstantiated..."

Rosencrantz:
"I see. *I see.* Well, this seems to support your story, such as it is. It is an exact command from the King of Denmark, for several different reasons, importing Denmark's health, and England's, too, that on the reading of this letter, without delay, I should have Hamlet's head cut off."